VIOLINIST Gongbo Jiang had a busy time of it last week. As a former beneficiary of the mentoring of Enterprise Music Scotland (EMS) with the Aurea String Quartet, he might have been at the celebration of 10 years of its residency project which featured two new commissions and the award-winning Maxwell String Quartet at Glasgow’s Renfield St Stephen’s Church last Saturday evening, but instead he was on the back desk of the second violins for what was a very large edition of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra playing Poulenc, Saint-Saens and Rimsky-Korsakov.

Immediately before those concerts the violinist was performing at his alma mater, the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland (RCS), where he was awarded a Masters in Chamber Music Performance in the spring, and where he now teaches. The concert was the debut of the new RCS Sinfonia, an elite ensemble created by award-winning cellist and the conservatoire’s Head of Strings, David Watkin, which it is hoped will do for the opportunities and reputation of the school’s instrumental teaching what RCS Voices has done for the choral and singing students in Glasgow.

With Watkin’s choreographic conducting bringing out the most colourful, dynamic playing from the group – currently strings only, but with plans to add wind instruments in the future – the RCS Sinfonia is already up to the challenge of Bach’s Orchestral Suite No3 (performed in its original scoring) and Richard Strauss’s Metamorphosen. Gongbo Jiang joined the current students as leader for the latter, but when it is described as being “for 23 solo strings” that is no jest – every player has to be at the top of their game, as much as for the Bach of two centuries earlier. The hour-long programme was patently a statement of intent by Watkins.

Both the new RCS Sinfonia and the established EMS Residency Project, which has often drawn its participants from those who are completing or have recently finished their studies at the Conservatoire, are important steps for musicians making that transition between studying and a performing career. It is an area on which teachers, and arts companies, now place important stress, helping build careers in the arts as well as developing the best young artists to the benefit of the professional world.

It is, regrettably, at the other end of process that things appear to be going badly awry. Music tuition in schools is still patchy at best, despite promises that date back to the earliest years of the Scottish Parliament, and in recent months we have seen a threat to the continuation of the specialist teaching provided at the City of Edinburgh Music School and now Aberdeen City Council’s breath-takingly short-sighted proposal to withdraw its funding from the Aberdeen International Youth Festival (AIYF).

The justification the councillors in the north east have given for preferring to give less money to local young folk in what has been the Scottish Government-designated Year of Young People 2018, is a little similar to the half-baked plan their Edinburgh counterparts announced to roll out the good work of the music school across the city. Just as that admirable vision of musical irrigation across the capital would have been hard to sustain after they had turned off the tap that was the source of it, if Aberdeen has any genuine aspiration to be a City of Culture – it is bidding for the 2025 title – it would be using the happy circumstance of being the city that has hosted an international festival of youth arts for nearly 50 years to enhance what the AIYF is able to do during Scotland’s Year of Young People, rather than seeking to end its funding association with the event.

As others have pointed out, the £150,000 grant the council gives to the AIYF is a minuscule fraction of its budget, however much that is under pressure, and the cynic might wonder if the education committee’s proposal was nothing more than a ploy to flush out alternative sources of revenue. As the reaction from generations of musicians who remember participation in the festival as a formative experience as well as outraged local voices has quickly shown, it has only cast doubt on the competence of the councillors themselves.